Recreational vehicles vastly improve outdoor life. Like a small cabin on wheels, they house many convenient living accommodations, while providing the mobility that enables rapid transformations from city to country life. Fewer concerns, more time to relax and enjoy, and a welcome degree of security result.
Waste disposal heads the list. A flexible drainpipe typically carries waste under the force of gravity to a point outside the vehicle for disposal. Additional sections of similar line are frequently required to extend the line to a more remote disposal site, when the standard pipe is not sufficiently long to extend the required distance.
Connecting up the additional section of flexible drainpipe is awkward and time consuming, and thus requires extra effort however. The RV drainpipe connectors currently available have not been entirely satisfactory, and are greatly in need of improvement.
Considering first the flexible drainpipe, formed from a coiled spring imbedded within a plastic casing, it offers both the strength and flexibility needed for typical camping use.
A typical conventional coupler or connector is simply a short tube or hollow cylindrical member, designed to be forced into adjoining ends of two axially aligned drainpipe sections. Since the diameters of the pipes and the coupler are substantially the same, it often requires great skill and strength to force the coupler into the end of the pipe to seal them together. Intended to fit closely into the drainpipe ends, the connector must often be pried and pounded into place, perhaps in the rain, perhaps in darkness, but, even on a sunny day, with great difficulty and often with damage to the drainpipe resulting. At the very least, the end of the drainpipe must become deformed by manually applied force to enable it to receive the coupler.
Consequently, it is desirable to have some better, easier to install device--one that can rapidly interconnect adjacent ends of two axially aligned flexible pipes in fluid communication, and be installed with little skill and attention.
Once in place, such couplers often continue to require unwanted attention. They often form an inadequate mechanically strong joint, for example, leaking and easily dislodging if bumped by a squirrel, or accidentally by a campsite vitor. Stress on the joint caused by uneven terrain also produces this result. Thus, it is desirable to have a device that produces a better, stronger, tighter joint.
Disassembly of the extended drainline has its problems as well. Drainpipe must be disassembled after an outing to enable cleaning and storage, and waste material remaining within the drainpipe makes it essential that this be done carefully to avoid strewing the waste about the campsite. Unfortunately, due to the tight friction fit, it is very difficult to forceably pull the coupler out of the end of the pipe, without spilling the waste contained within the pipe.
Existing connectors often only compound the problems, by becoming accidentally dislodged at inopportune times with waste spilling therefrom. Consequently, it is desirable to have a device that functions more predictably in this respect to enable controlled disassembly, to avoid or at least greatly reduce the possibility of spilling waste material.
There have been many different types and kinds of couplers and adapters designed for similar purposes. Refer, for example, to U.S. Pat. Nos. 2,419,453; 2,441,055; 2,885,225; 3,667,787; 3,806,169 and 4,061,368. But none solve the foregoing problems.